Page 125 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

of life, or, we may say, the whole process of organic evolution.

Within this context, and within the general framework of the
Noble Eightfold Path, Perfect Effort represents the fact that the

spiritual life is in a sense the continuation, the culmination,
even the consummation, of the entire evolutionary process. For
this reason Perfect Effort is sometimes spoken of in terms of

'the conscious evolution of man'.

Perfect Effort
The English word 'effort' represents, as we have seen, the
Sanskrit word vyama, and in the modern languages of Northern

India such as Hindi, Gujerati and Marathi, the latter is still
current and means physical exercise, especially in the sense of

gymnastics. For instance, when they want to translate the
English — or rather Greek — word gymnasium into their
languages they render it as vyamsala' or 'hall of exercise'. Thus

we begin to get some idea of what the word connotes. This
stage of Samyak-vyama, or Perfect Effort, indeed draws our

attention to a very important point: that the spiritual life is an
active life. The spiritual life is not an armchair life. On the
contrary, it is an active life, even a dynamic one. Now this

activity, this action, is not necessarily physical. That the spiritual
life is an active life does not mean that you must be always

rushing around 'doing things' in a crude, external, physical
sense. But it certainly means that you should be mentally,
spiritually, even aesthetically, active. In fact, we may say that

this stage of the Eightfold Path stands for the element of what
we may call spiritual athleticism, which is a very characteristic

and very prominent feature of Buddhism.

Generalizing, we may say that Buddhism is for the active. It is

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